Tag: influence (page 2 of 4)

I'm a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I'm part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create "something to shoot at", and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we're an open and transparent working group, I thought I'd post it here too. Do get in touch if you'd like to tell me what you think. Now's the time for dialogue – particularly if you can't attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting. Read more

Jessica Burnette-Lemon is Senior Editor of Communication World, the IABC's member magazine. I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica on the topical and some might say controversial topic of influence (in the context of marketing and PR of course).

The resultant article appears in the current issue of the magazine, but because it's a publication for members' eyes only, I can't add a link here.

Fortunately, Jessica has given me permission to reproduce the article right here, "A Measure Of Influence" (PDF). I hope you find it interesting.

The article pulls out one quote up front. At the risk of stating the obvious:

The best way to exert useful influence remains to deliver great products and services so that your customers evangelize your brand to friends and family, and to be a well-run organization so that your employees and partners evangelize working with you.

The Illustrated History of Content

A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning ... both an advantage and disadvantage.

So, we've been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we've been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.

Well I for one consider social business to be quite distinct from social media. Others use the terms synonymously. The lexicon battle is underway and it will be some years hence before the dictionaries document the victory. For now then, allow me the airtime to support the assertion ... social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

The AMECEuropean Summit is taking place this week in Dublin. It's a really vibrant event, a credit to AMEC's Barry Leggetter and the delegates' enthusiasm. (Actually, perhaps it's a little less vibrant this morning after the visit last night to the Guiness brewery!)

I'm here representing the CIPR in a couple of sessions, and this morning I'm speaking in my own capacity... my slidestack is embedded above.

It's an old theme of mine, the misrepresentation of the idea of influence, and the stack I presented on the topic back in March 2010 has now been viewed some thirteen and a half thousand times – Influence, the bullshit, best practice and promise. It's now 2012 and I feel that we're starting to make some progress towards addressing the complexity of the business of influence. Onwards and upwards.

This is the third installment of our ‘Q&A with the Review’ series in which we talk with prominent members of the influencer marketing community about their work and thoughts on the industry. Amanda Maksymiw and Duncan Brown helped us get the series started, and now we’re grateful that Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence, is joining us for our third Q&A.

IMR: Thanks so much for joining us, Philip. And congratulations on the book. We know that’s no easy feat.

Philip: Thanks for the invitation to chat here. And thanks for having my book cover on IMR’s homepage :-)

IMR: Oh yeah. It’s probably about time we change the image, huh.

You’ve stated in the book and elsewhere that “the business of influence is broken.” What do you mean by that exactly? Some might think there wasn’t much of a “business of influence” in the first place.

Philip: A definition of influence: you have been influenced when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done, or think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought. There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do, and yet despite this we often apportion responsibility for influence to marketing and PR departments. The 2012 organization looks incredibly similar to the 1992 organization, which is crazy when you consider the impact of social media and related information technologies.

That's how I opened a blog post back in November, The Influence View of Content, and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.

Names have been changed...

Incident 1

Anne: "So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time."

Me: "So if we're looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us... the owned stuff that has earned a share – a 'Like', a RT, a +1 for example." Read more

I hope it goes without saying that I'm happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.

If media is interesting because it facilitates communication, whether that communication is mediated or disintermediated, then communication is most interesting when it facilitates influence.

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn't otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn't otherwise have done. Simple as, although you wouldn't think it now that influence is the hot word.

The capacity to change hearts, minds and deeds is considered the mark of the great communicator, the compelling personality, the charismatic politician, and ultimately no one wants to communicate without influence; that wouldn't be a good use of the communicator's time and energy, or indeed that of those on the receiving end.

The focus on making sure you're influenced back is vital too. Individuals (and organisations) that best absorb the zeitgeist are heuristically more able to respond in ways their audiences (stakeholders) might well appreciate.

Influence is complex, and I mean that in the full "complexity science" sense of the word. Complexity is the phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects. The interacting objects could be molecules of air and the phenomenon the weather. It could be vehicles and the phenomenon the traffic. Read more

Précis

The Influence View of Content aims to establish something more useful. It’s a perspective that seeks to help influence professionals think about how influence goes around and comes around in line with the Influence Scorecard framework.

Definition: Influence – you have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Definition: The Influence Scorecard – serves as both the methodology for defining influence strategy and the tool for executing it.

Paid Owned Earned

With the proliferation of what used to be known as “new media”, it was natural to attempt some sort of descriptive taxonomy: Read more